Gemellus maintained that he was a carpenter's son, a child prodigy, and "extremely handsome, charismatic and persuasive". He was able to amass great audiences when he spoke, and his lectures often attacked Judaism as inadequate to inform the rigours of daily life.

Those who came to follow Jesus as a deity believed he was the Messiah, "Christos" meaning "saviour" in Greek. Others thought of him as a "maverick rabbi", or a "false prophet".

Gemellus also knew of a story, of which he was no great believer, that Jesus' body, after death, had somehow vanished after its entombment. Christians, he said, believed that he had come back to life, resurrected by the Jewish God. (PROSE: Byzantium!)